Hacker News Reader

Their concept of a "two year old" is completely different from our concept. So though the words may translate the same, it's just a different definition. For them, it's equally weird to think that a child would go through a year of life being "0 years old."

View on HN

It just seems like they still used the age for things like: When do you start school, when can you vote, drink and so on, all of which in my mind has always been linked to some expectation of maturity (justified or not).

If school starts a six, then some of those children could be one to two years younger than others. For adult either way seems fine, there's little difference between 35 and 37, but for the youngest children it seems like it would make a huge difference.

Under the old system, the oldest person "age 6" is still 365 days older than the youngest.

An infant born on 2022-01-01 is currently "2", the same "age" as a baby born on 2022-12-31.

The children will all still be within one year of each other, they're just making the cutoff for each year-long age cohort December 31 instead of some date in August or September like they would in the US. In practice, it makes little difference.

"0 years old" does seem weird... some part of that is probably because we seem to refer to children in their first year of life as "X months old".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com